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Daily Archives: February 8, 2013

Over on Twitter, DMStevens sent me a link to this post by Timothy Burke. I’m just going to say up front that it’s really dense and a little on the academic side and the fact that he’s only got a few commenters and it’s already devolved into a gun control debate just goes to show that, even if it were in plainer language, what he’s attempting to get at isn’t something most people are ready to grapple with.

Still, I’m linking to it because I feel like he’s struggling toward something similar to what I’ve been struggling with. I do think that everyone who wants to buy a gun should have a background check–whether that means doing background checks at the point of sale or having a gun license that the government hands out that says you’ve been cleared to buy a gun. And I think that it should be very hard for people who use guns to commit crimes or to terrorize their loved ones in abusive situations to get their guns back once the courts have taken them away. I think you should HAVE to report a stolen gun. I’d like to see the laws we have regularly and consistently enforced. And that’s the gun reform I’m interested in. Everything else seems to be about just doing something symbolic to ward off bad things.

But the thing that terrifies me about the pro-gun people is that it’s clear that, for many of them, guns are magic. Something bad happens? Well, we should just arm teachers. Something else bad happens? Well, everyone should carry a gun in their cars. But when you try to get at what this would actually mean–how, for instance, are we going to train people to shoot children (which is what they’d have to be prepared to do to stop most school shooters)? Who’s going to help them process the fact that they’re trained to shoot children? Etc. I’ve already written about this. But also with guns in cars? How do you keep the gun securely in your car? What happens if it gets stolen? What steps can we take to make sure that children don’t get a hold of guns? All this stuff about what it really means, practically, to have such a powerful machine in the hands of everyone. And the resistance to talking about the practicality is just enormous.

And I don’t think it is within the gun community. I think they pretty regularly talk about this stuff among themselves. But when someone from outside wants to talk about it, it devolves, on both sides, into a kind of theological discussion. And I think this is what Burke is grappling with, too.

He says,

What I remember as we talked about the shooting in San Francisco is that he believed, ardently and sincerely, that if he had been in the San Francisco offices that day he would have found a way to stop the gunman. He would have tackled him or disarmed him or found a weapon. I don’t think this was empty chest-thumping on his part: he was serious and sincere and very willing to concede that maybe he would have died in the attempt. But he maintained that he would have tried.

My father was speaking the language of American witchcraft. And in saying this, I do not for one minute mock or dismiss him or his counterfactual imagining of that horrible day. Gian Luigi Ferri was one kind of American sorcerer, and my father was another. The two deep cultural ideas that we hold to that manifest around guns and gun control alike–and around many other things besides guns–are as follows: 1) that individual action focused by will, determination and clarity of intent can always directly produce specific outcomes and equally that individuals who fail to act when confronted by circumstances (including the actions of other individuals) are culpable for whatever happens next and 2) that there are single-variable abstract social forces that are responsible for seemingly recurrent events and that the proper establishing structure, rule or policy can cancel out the impact of that variable, if only we can figure out which one is the right one.

The whole post is so good, but, if you’re not going to read the whole thing, just ruminate on those two interconnected ideas. Because, wow, holy shit.

He has a kidney stone. He’s pissed because he had to miss work because his mom made him go to the hospital. He said, “I wasn’t crying that hard.” Then he paused and said, “Well, I guess if you can’t move without crying, you should go to the hospital. Still, it sucks I had to miss work.”

I finished up the Square Es last night, which, you might note, look very similar to the Square As of the other day. They are, in fact, the mirror opposites of each other. And, if I remember right, the most time consuming squares. But just to give you a sense of how fast this part goes–there are only twenty squares. It feels like I both just started these this week and that I’m not doing them very quickly and I have eight done. Bam. Just like that.

This is my favorite square so far. It’s got what is to me the Platonic Ideal of big squares up there in the left hand corner, just being awesome. Then it’s filled with squares that compliment it so beautifully, but then there’s the blue and the orange trying to remind you that life is not all sitting around listening to Neutral Milk Hotel wondering where we went wrong as a species and crying over how such terrible fuck-ups can still make beautiful things.

The most interesting part to me is that said blue doesn’t really behave that way when it’s not next to the orange. If you check out the little sliver of it down left of the orange, you can see how it is lively but not that lively when paired with the other colors in the afghan. I simply cannot wait to piece this whole thing together. It’s going to be so nice, I think.

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